Over a year has now passed since a government-proposed 75 per cent tuition hike was met with the full force of student protests in Quebec. Since then, it is clear that this “Printemps Érable” movement has not yet translated effectively to English-speaking Canada.
The Ontario government recently approved an annual increase in tuition rates of 3 per cent for the foreseeable future, marking a 71 per cent tuition increase since 2006. It is common knowledge among U of T students that the average Ontarian is now paying roughly $7,000 a year in tuition fees, compared to $2,500 in Quebec — a rate that has for the most part stayed put for the past 50 years.
In order to comprehend why efforts to increase university tuition in Ontario have gone through with relative ease when compared to the inescapable public outcry that similar hikes have sparked in Quebec, several factors must be considered. The first is the marked difference in attitude toward higher education between the two provinces, the other is the difference in tactics that each province’s youth have employed to combat rising tuition fees — successfully in Quebec, unsuccessfully in Ontario.
First off, Quebec has an ideological edge when it comes to keeping tuition low and education accessible, which is absent in Ontario. In Quebec, higher education is seen as a public good that society invests in for everyone’s benefit and for which society receives intelligent and productive individuals contributing to the community. The Québécois philosophy dictates that in times of economic disparity, the government should invest in providing the population, regardless of income, with the opportunity to achieve financial independence and, in turn, give back. This fundamental difference in attitude towards the government’s role in higher education represents the greatest barrier Ontarians face when they challenge tuition hikes.
In contrast, Ontario overwhelmingly views post-secondary education as a private investment an individual makes in order to increase their individual value in the workforce. This notion supports the idea that the quality and price of an education are inextricably linked. A social movement on the scale of that seen in Quebec could never succeed in a province where post-secondary education is viewed as a special privilege, valuable only because of its relative scarcity in the job market.
Another hurdle for would-be student revolutionaries in Ontario to overcome is the absence of protest culture and the lack of established methods of mobilizing protestors in this province. Again, here Quebec has an advantage — with its long-standing and traditionally successful history of opposing tuition hikes. In Quebec, it is widely expected that today’s youth carry out the ideals set out in the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. Last year’s riots marked the ninth major tuition protest in the province’s history. As a testament to their effectiveness, mass movements have been the weapon of choice for decades of students set on protecting their “sacred right” to accessible education. Protests in Quebec can achieve crowds of over a quarter-million demonstrators that bring government to a halt.
While this environment of social change in Quebec has been fifty years in the making, Quebecers have provided Ontario students with the blueprint for achieving their goals by using the power of student union coalitions. The Quebec student protests owe their overwhelming numbers to the creation of CLASSE, a coalition of over 67 independent student associations from 6 universities united in their fight for accessible education. CLASSE’s coalition mobilized its movement effectively by opening up its decision-making structure to small, non-member student associations and operating along the principles of direct democracy. By allowing otherwise unrepresented students to participate with equal voting rights in open meetings CLASSE was able to achieve complete coordination in shaping their movement.
At a university where individual colleges, let alone their respective student associations, do not communicate, and in a province where discourse between universities and their student unions is virtually non-existent, it is no surprise that Ontario has failed where Quebec has persevered. Quebec students believe that if student associations act independently, the government will ignore them. In order for Ontario students to see similar results to their Québécois counterparts, they must be united in their petitions to policy makers. Only then could Ontario hope to at last enjoy its very own Maple Spring.
Cassandra Mazza is a second-year student from Victoria University studying English
